“The most important task is to make great movies,” said Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam at the start of Thursday’s Artist Services Workshop at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference. “All this talk about audiences is meaningless unless you have something in your heart you want to get out there.” However, Putnam’s comments were not to construe that filmmakers shouldn’t think about the rapidly changing world of distribution, marketing and audience building. As Putnam went on to say, it is “easier, less expensive to make a movie, but no easier to find an audience. There is a volume of movies and a […]
After sitting through the majority of the New Narratives presentations on day one of the Filmmaker Conference at IFP Film Week, my brain is almost too awash with content to compile anything but a listicle. From conversations with cinematographers like Reed Morano and producers like Mynette Louie to an Obvious Child case study and Kevin B. Lee’s mini-keynote, here is a handful of the major takeaways I gleaned from yesterday’s Conference. 1. For co-productions, don’t assume hiring local crew is the cheapest option. Arriving to the Icelandic set of Land Ho!, producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy realized they were sharing ground with a slightly larger production: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. […]
With the recent Berberian Sound Studio and now The Editor, we’re in a bit of a giallo revival. Or, more accurately, the gory, gloriously art decorated Italian horror thrillers of the 1970s have inspired a new generation to pay homage in the form of their own meta-commentaries. Interestingly, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and this year’s Toronto-premiering The Editor both feature post-production crew as their protagonists. In Berberian Sound Studio, it was a foley artist; in The Editor, Matthew Kennedy and Adam Brooks’ horror comedy, our hero is a once-vaunted picture editor who, following an accident, now must wield his […]
Freefly made a splash with their MōVI brushless gimbals, and now they have a remote controlled car. The Tero is a remote controlled car that has had a “full overhaul.” This includes run flat wheels, larger shocks, and wire rope isolators between the mounting cheeseplate and the car to further reduce vibration. At the recent Massachusetts Media Expo, Dylan Law, the in-house Freefly MōVI tech at Rule Boston Camera, talked about the car and even did a short demo. The car can reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour and is literally plug-in and go. The car was fitted […]
The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]
“Before Sunrise with a supernatural twist” is how Toronto programmer Colin Geddes preps us for Spring, the second co-directed feature by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. In their earlier Resolution, the two explored themes of friendship and substance abuse within a twisty, ironic horror narrative. Here, as Geddes indicates, they decamp for abroad, settling their film in Italy where a young American traveler (Lou Pucci) falls for a beautiful German woman (Nadia Hilker). A (“terror”) romance follows. Below, we talk to the two directors about shooting abroad and trying to stay original when working within the horror genre. Spring has […]
There’s a certain rhetoric about the “perfect pop song” that feels like it peaked 25ish years ago somewhere on a bus in the UK, where earnest young people bonded over shared cultdom to pass the time, the guiding sensibility that (random example) led Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins to approach future bandmate Steve Daly because of a Buddy Holly button he was wearing — a sign they had more to talk about than initially evident. This kind of living through music is the force powering Belle and Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut God Help The Girl, an indie pop […]
On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]
A few years ago I was doing a 30-minute internet radio show and decided one day to re-purpose it as a podcast. I thought, why not? Public radio shows like This American Life and Radiolab were doing it. I was also realizing that I was wasting my time being on the radio at all. Filmwax Radio was not public radio, and I assumed correctly that only a relatively small number of people were tuning in. I also thought that going podcast-only would be an opportunity to change my show’s format. I’d no longer be constrained by a 30-minute slot, nor […]
In his short film Not So Fast, filmmaker David Sandberg managed to achieve a dramatic tunnel effect with no more than a few Ikea products and the free 3D modeling app, Blender. The very embodiment of DIY ethos, Sandberg fashioned a portable light — enclosed in a trashcan — to his dolly — a bit of shelving — and orchestrated the action atop his PVC pipe track. Granted, his battery pack and Black Magic Cinema Camera don’t exactly run cheap, but the homemade equipment used to relay his protagonist’s sleepwalking probably rounded out to no more than $30. Watch Sandberg break down his […]